Ever been in a situation where a friend of yours is trying to show you a video of something that happened to him at a party and the two of you end up standing far too close to each for 10 minutes as he tries to find the exact frame to point out to you, hoping that you’ll find his creative endeavor amusing? It’s painful, but luckily Nokia is working on solving that with what they’re calling “Shoot and Tag“. It’s beta software, coming straight out of an R&D Lab, but what it promises to do is automatically detect when the scene you’re recording changes. It then creates a chapter that you can fast forward to, in much the same way you can on a DVD. Right now the video capture isn’t able to fully utilize the 720p capabilities of Nokia’s latest smartphones, but that’s going to come at some point in the future. Also note that these chapters can’t be exported to your computer. They live on your phone.
Does this compete with iMovie on the iPhone? Not really. While iMovie does have the ability to let you finely scrub through your videos to find that perfect shot, Nokia’s solution is more automatic. Is there anything like this on Android? Sadly, there isn’t, but there’s supposed to be a movie editing application coming out for Android tablets made by the girls and boys at Google … so maybe it too wouldn’t be a stretch to say that they’re going to port it over to smartphones.
At the end of the day we appreciate these little things companies try and do to make our already wonderful smartphones just a little bit cooler. Shoot and Tag will become increasingly important as more and more people eventually begin to connect their handsets to their HDTV and show off their creative side.